Nuclear power: Too hot to handle

Nuclear power: As countries from the UK to China rush to review their atomic energy programmes, the Fukushima failures threaten the industry with another long freeze, write Ed Crooks and Sylvia Pfeifer

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Nuclear power: As countries from the UK to China rush to review their atomic energy programmes, the Fukushima failures threaten the industry with another long freeze, write Ed Crooks and Sylvia Pfeifer

As Japan's infatuation with the great nominal stock market experiment continues, the government wishes nothing more than to put the great Fukushima nuclear disaster in the past, so it can restart its nuclear power plants: the critical, decisive factor if Abenomics has any chance of succeeding, as the country's economy will never recover if it has to rely on foreign sources of energy. Alas, for the time being this looks improbable and following the latest news out of Fukushima, it may be downright impossible.

By Qineqt:Nuclear power currently provides about 13.5% percent of the world's electricity. OECD countries take about a quarter of this share, whereas developing countries account for much lower demand.

It takes two years to build them. Each operator trains for a month before picking up their controls. And they get fried by radiation after working for just ten hours.
The robots sent in to search the core of the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant have a very short and specialized lifespan.
Five years after the triple meltdown at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant north of Tokyo, decommissioning and cleanup continue.

TOKYO/WARSAW — China, the EU and environmentalists criticized Japan at UN climate talks on Friday for slashing its greenhouse gas emissions target after its nuclear power industry was shuttered by the Fukushima disaster.
The Japanese government on Friday decided to target a 3.8% emissions cut by 2020 versus 2005 levels. That amounts to a 3% rise from a UN benchmark year of 1990 and the reversal of the previous target of a 25 percent reduction.